Toronto Movie Index

March 2008 Archive

Run, Fat Boy, Run (***)

Posted on March 28, 2008 by

image for Run, Fat Boy, Run (***)

David Schwimmer’s big-screen directorial debut, Run, Fat Boy, Run, unquestionably belongs to Simon Pegg, its co-writer and star. Pegg, best known for his partnerships with Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, has a doltish, deer-in-the-headlights expression that belies a clever, cruel sense of humour. As Run, Fat Boy, Run’s Dennis Doyle, he animates a comedic cliché, the loser-underdog—in this case, a London slacker who leaves his fiancée, Libby (Thandie Newton), at the altar only to challenge her new boyfriend, Whit (Hank Azaria), to a marathon in order to win her back. Doyle doesn’t need an overhaul so much as a confidence boost: he’s got the right opinion about Whit (a showboating corporate shark who works in The Gherkin) and his attempts at training—which he does in vintage rock T-shirts and H&M undies—are brash, Cleesian parodies of the sport. Continue...

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (***)

Posted on March 28, 2008 by

image for The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (***)

Cao Hamburger’s The Year My Parents Went on Vacation deals with the primary subject (next, perhaps, to adultery) of foreign films that reach English audiences: coming of age. No one with the slightest interest in seeing the film should be surprised, then, by its positioning of a defining moment in a child’s life against a backdrop of political upheaval. Here, Mauro (Michel Joelsas), a young Brazilian soccer fanatic eagerly anticipating a Pelé-led victory at the 1970 World Cup, is dropped off at his grandfather’s apartment building by his parents. They tell him they’re going on vacation, but they are really trying to escape persecution from the country’s mounting military dictatorship.

Continue...

Days of Darkness (**)

Posted on March 21, 2008 by

image for Days of Darkness (**)

Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness (L’Âge des ténèbres) is the end of a trilogy that began with The Decline of the American Empire and continued with The Barbarian Invasions. Like those films, it pitches itself as a scathing satire of contemporary Québécois society. Yet this recent outing is mostly about contemporary society in the entire developed world—perhaps about life as it has always been for critical, sensitive people—and is too crude and smug to be terribly scathing. Continue...

Paranoid Park (****)

Posted on March 21, 2008 by

image for Paranoid Park (****)

Gus Van Sant’s fans, dwindling in number though they may be, like to enthuse about transcendent moments in his cinema—moments that to non-fans come off as plodding, hollow and, if beautiful young men are involved, unnecessarily and uncomfortably lecherous. Paranoid Park, the director’s latest, is patently his—all of his themes and tactics are here in droves, occasionally to the film’s detriment—but it goes a long way toward substantiating his fans’ claims.

Continue...

Snow Angels (**)

Posted on March 21, 2008 by

image for Snow Angels (**)

The paint-by-numbers American realism of David Gordon Green’s (George Washington, All the Real Girls) new ensemble piece, Snow Angels is, at first, endurable. Set in small-town Pennsylvania, the film introduces us to a familiar group of suffering white people: sexually awakened teenager Arthur (Michael Angarano), who is coping with the separation of his parents; Arthur’s old babysitter Annie (Kate Beckinsale), who now has a child of her own; her estranged, possibly psychotic, born-again husband, Glen (Sam Rockwell); and Barb (Amy Sedaris), whose husband, Nate (Nicky Katt), is having an affair with Annie. Dime-store literary devices, which are Green’s stock-in-trade, are everywhere—Arthur’s cold, emotionally unavailable father (Griffin Dunne) studies the sex life of plants; Arthur’s new girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) wears vintage glasses, carries a vintage camera, and sees things for what they really are—but there is a certain momentum created by the characters’ brief, tetchy interactions. A handful of improvised scenes with Annie’s child Tara (Grace Hudson) are particularly noteworthy. Continue...

Funny Games (**)

Posted on March 14, 2008 by

image for Funny Games (**)

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, both his original 1997 Austrian film and the new (more or less) shot-for-shot American remake, is like that relentless, twerpy guy in your Intro to Philosophy class: disagree with him all you want, but he’ll just keep finding ways to use your arguments against you. To rail against Funny Games for being cruel, manipulative and juvenile is to play right into its caustic little palm: if you hate it and leave, you’re a hypocrite; if you love it (or hate it and stay anyway) you’re a sadist. Continue...

Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (***)

Posted on March 14, 2008 by

image for Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (***)

Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! is such an effective, universal tale that it can be, and has been, spun any which way. Its tale of an elephant’s steadfast, verifiable belief in life on a tiny speck of dust (“A person’s a person, no matter how small” is the book’s famous moral) can be harnessed as allegorical propaganda for right or left, libertarianism or communism, god or science. Continue...

Sleepwalking (*)

Posted on March 14, 2008 by

image for Sleepwalking (*)

The intended grittiness of Sleepwalking is instantly compromised by opening shots of a dark eyelinered, snakeskin-booted Charlize Theron, whose character’s name is Joleen, freaking out at a police station over her boyfriend’s recent arrest for marijuana possession. Then she gets into a car with her brother James (Nick Stahl), pulls out a cigarette, and begins alternating nicotine puffs with blasts from her asthma inhaler. Continue...

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (****)

Posted on March 7, 2008 by

image for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (****)

There’s something not quite right about Frances McDormand’s Miss Pettigrew. A frowzy clergyman’s daughter who works as a London governess—an unsuccessful venture for her, as she can’t help proselytizing to her employers—she begins the film penniless, and soon falls into the service of Delysia Lafosse (the irrepressible Amy Adams), whose glamour seems bound to change her forever. Continue...

10,000 B.C. (no stars)

Posted on March 7, 2008 by

image for 10,000 B.C. (no stars)

In Roland Emmerich’s version of 10,000 B.C.—the year “when legend began” as his film’s tag line tells us—sabre-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths and flesh-eating birds attack a tribe of English-speaking dreadlocked men with manicured, overdeveloped chests and arms (Ben Harper and Lenny Kravitz’s ancestors, presumably?). Pyramids are erected. Disparate ecosystems (rain forests, savannahs, mountain ranges) are kitty-corner to each other. Love and magic—notably the powers of an old soothsayer with an uncanny resemblance to the Boob Lady from The Simpsons Movie—make the world go around. Continue...